My wife actually prefers an SLR like camera. She likes how it is a substantial camera, and she appreciates the much nicer much more memorable shots you get from it. I actually made a mistake once, for about 6 months. We had this Canon Rebel that we had for years. No special lenses or anything, just the kit + 1 telezoom. It was the original 6mp Rebel. The pictures were great. Colors were good, sharp, nice depth in most photos. Didn't think anything else, just lugged the camera around for years on end. Started building a nice family photo library. Kept on buying USB drive after USB drive, with backups of backups (still doing that of course, but now they're like 3TB needing like 2 days to make a backup of, lol).

Ok, so, the Canon finally broke. I think we *actually* wore out the shutter. I was stumped. How could this happen? Ok, so now what. Nah, all these SLRs are all past times now. Let's get something handy, something you can stick in your pocket. So I got this $250 Panasonic camera. *Very* compact, great zoom, optical stabilizer (! in such a small package), and I swear, with probably 10 times the number of options in the menus as anything else ever made. The toddler has been playing with it, and he's discovered all kinds of slideshows with background music, and has been discovered so many features, it's absurd. We used that camera for 6 months (a number of years ago). Pictures at first glance seemed ok. But... everything is flat, infinite dof, colors are blant, videos look like crap, zooming in makes pixels look like a mixed up soup. Awful. Then, the A33 when it came out. We're back again! Plus then on a lens hunt. Lens after lens after lens. An box in the mail just about every other week.

Looking back at the photo library, I'm knocking my head. Why oh why did I do this? The Canon photos were good, the Sony photos were very good, but w t h is up with that P&S era. Wife feels the same way.

So now you see people more and more waving around pocket cameras, and... good grief... cell phones. Arg. Iphone this, Android that. Kids preschool graduation. Parents show up. Picture time. Out come the cell phones. Some even brought their tablets. A few SLRs. I'm there with my handy A57, with the flip out screen, taking photos and video. Much handier than any product any of the other parents were using. The SLRs all look like dinosaurs. Squinting through tiny holes. I'm there with the flip out screen, holding the camera low, looking down on the screen, and getting on all the kids' level. I'm the only one coming home with good and more memorable shots than the rest. You'd figure that at least one parent would ask "hey, that's neat, what's that you're using". But oh no, the way people are, people just frown and say absolutely nothing. O well, their loss.

So... if there is the possibility of talking the wife out of the P&S, and get everyone to stop using cell phones to capture life's moments, do it. Cell phones ought to not have any cameras built in, or, people shouldn't be using it to replace proper photography. It is totally worth it going through the pains of using a full size proper camera.

As for kids. If you don't have any kids, you have much less expenses. Splurge and get the A77. It's got things like IR focus assist light, focus adjust, more focus points, and from the looks of it, even though it has the same sensor, the measured results are that the A77 is better than the A65 (is it though? have to verify this)...